


good luck, bad luck, survival

by runobody2



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-typical violence and body horror, Gen, Missing Scene, Soup Scene, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Pride, if what you wanted from harrow was more scenes of her cutting onions while sleep deprived, mild character study elements, not more graphically violent than the canon soup chapter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26531215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runobody2/pseuds/runobody2
Summary: The first volume in the stack of aging technical manuals shoved into the kitchen drawer was called The Joy of Cooking.  You didn’t much see what joy had to do with cooking, but then again, you didn’t much see what joy had to do with Mercymorn, and that hadn’t stopped her yet.-Five pieces of culinary advice Harrowhark took to heart, and one she did not.
Comments: 28
Kudos: 84





	good luck, bad luck, survival

**Author's Note:**

> For the fic jam prompt, pride.
> 
> Title is from [The North, by Stars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e4JECimr0k), which always makes me think of Harrow in that general section of the book.

> Your soup did not look like a bad effort, and you had been vaguely proud of it: the thick, translucent gold-whiteness of the pot liquor; the unburnt onion floating in white, stratified wedges; the candy-orange of the stored carrots. You had read up on vegetables carefully, trying to overcome your aversion to their colours: you had not wanted anything that might dissolve entirely in the soup over the length of cooking called for. “Needs salt,” was Ianthe’s judgement.

—Harrow the Ninth, Chapter 25

* * *

_1\. Anyone can cook. All it takes is a willingness to learn._

The first volume in the stack of aging technical manuals shoved into the kitchen drawer was called The Joy of Cooking. You didn’t much see what joy had to do with cooking, but then again, you didn’t much see what joy had to do with Mercymorn, and that hadn’t stopped her yet.

You lifted it gently; the whole thing was made of paper, and you had a disembodied suspicion that it had been printed sometime before the Resurrection. It seemed likely that there were whole throngs of Sixth scholars who would have cursed a new generation of your family for every additional moment you exposed it to air or light.

You opened the book. On the first page there stared up at you [an illustration of a maniacally smiling woman](https://64.media.tumblr.com/f0ce680fbece3d021adb439a853cfde2/d5625272e3a7cdde-0f/s640x960/364a3bc2225366de29a35e6951dd9a864b3e4736.png) holding a fork and a pan aloft above her head like she was about to murder, or worse, embrace you with them. The way they were rendered, her eyebrows might have been a semicircle, her hair a mesh cleaning implement. Such a cornucopia of food items was spread before her that it hurt your eyes to look upon and your mind to think about.

Gingerly, you closed The Joy of Cooking, and pulled the next volume from the drawer.

* * *

_2\. Half of a successful meal is knowing one’s audience. Before a home cook embarks on the rewarding and yet often tumultuous experience of hosting a dinner party, she (or he!) ought to first consider the proclivities of the guests._

Ortus disliked celery, you knew, and turnips, and you’d never seen him eat a carrot. He liked onions but only once they had been melted down into slippery golden chunks. He picked the cilantro out of his food almost religiously. You thought that Mercymorn always scattered a finely minced tablespoon of the green over the top of anything she made specifically so that she might have the pleasure rolling her eyes at him as he carefully ate around it. She always muttered something about ten thousand years of lyctorhood and soap and genetics under her breath.

It took a long time to find an appropriate recipe. In the end it required substitutions, which you made through a mixture of consultation with charts and analysis of a sizeable corpus of soup recipes. You disassembled the parts of them: aromatics, spices, liquid, meat or bone, heat and time. Learning by theory alone the patterns to taste, like maps to a country you were barred from, gave you the familiar feeling of reading a paper on a necromantic field you had no aptitude for.

* * *

_3\. One cannot overstate the importance of having all necessary ingredients on hand, having been procured freshly and at high-quality if possible._

In your case it was more that you had the necessary ingredients in shin. The only thing you had known from the start was that it would have to be marrow and it would have to be your own; whatever else had happened, stem cells aside, you were still a bone witch and you always would be. When you had compiled the rest of your ingredient list you went to the storerooms. The produce was easy, more or less. You had gotten good at avoiding everything strongly-tasting or strongly-colored, and that awareness now served you well in reverse. Your eyes, aching in slow throbs in your dried-out skull, hunted longer for spices: parsley and sage, turmeric and bay.

Eventually you had stowed everything away in the refrigeration unit and you had to stop your stalling. Fearful of the mess, you perched on a folded towel on the edge of the bathtub in your underwear and a black shirt. It might be more practical to sit naked in the bathtub, but the memory of the last time you had been that way was deeply, presently fresh in your mind.

You closed your eyes for a moment. When you opened them again the light swam in and out above you, distances feeling both liquid and monstrous. After Mercymorn’s lesson on cortisol, it was not much harder to stimulate your adrenal gland. When you grew the shank of bone out of your knuckles, you felt it less as pain than blurry recognition, as of an old hymn, softly heard.

* * *

_4\. Preparation is the key to success. Make sure all of your ingredients are washed and cut before you think of turning on the stove, and the cooking process will be a breeze._

Your eyes watered as you chopped the onions, annoyingly more so than they had for any of the other onions you’d so far sliced in your short culinary tenure. You felt this was both unfair and unfortunate, as every passing sleepless, overwrought moment stacked upon the rest to make you feel progressively worse, and you would have chosen if you could to deal with the more astringent onions earlier. The stinging you didn’t mind, but the tears blurred your vision and you were afraid you were about to embark on some self-mutilation, this time of the unplanned variety.

The moment you realized you didn't actually have to be doing this at all, you nearly cursed. You might have, if your mouth didn’t feel too stiff to open on a whim. Instead, you set the knife down, uncurling your fingers one by one, and took a step back to draw a chip of bone from the pocket of your robes. You summoned a skeleton to do your chopping for you, and went to grind your turmeric into powder with the mortar and pestle. This constituted as restful for you, as an activity more or less indistinguishable from your childhood diversions of grinding ash for necromantic tinctures.

* * *

_5\. Follow your recipe carefully, from first to last step, but don’t worry too much if things don’t go precisely to plan. With experience, most problems can be fixed._

Your recipe starts, like most every other that you’d read, with the blooming of aromatics in lipids. Carrots, celery, leeks; the half of the onions you were planning on melting into the broth, all the better to entice Ortus the First into drinking it. The other half of the onions, marked by your hand for a very different fate than its brethren, you’d toss in towards the end for him to avoid.

In the pot of unfamiliar food forms, the leeks felt absurdly like an old friend. You had not even known they were aromatics, which seemed strange considering all the tedious hours you’d spent in your life devoted to leek husbandry. The winter you had been twelve, there had been a horrible slug infestation that had threatened the crop, and you had spent sleepless nights in the library reading agricultural texts.

You had hoped that that particular brush with the horrors of privation would be the last sleep-deprived, leek-involved, mortal-danger incident of your life, but alas, in vain. After you’d added the water and advanced to the simmering section of the soup process, you set the timer and sat down at the table to wait. Chin resting in your hands, you thought of how cold it had been that winter, the snow in the fields, anxiety worming holes in the pit of your belly as much as the hunger did. Then you rose again in the luscious warmth of the kitchen on this space station that had never known fuel rationing, and went to stir your soup; fragrant as it now was with its abundance of vegetables, and the slowly rendering tissues of your body.

* * *

_-1. Ultimately, the most important tenet of cooking is that it be safe, sane, and consensual._

And then you burst the construct grown out of your own bone through your dinner guest’s stomach, rupturing the cavity of his abdomen like a bloody balloon, and tunneled upwards, straight for his brain.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [outlaw_baby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlaw_baby/pseuds/outlaw_baby) for the shin joke, and [lowbrw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowbrw/pseuds/lowbrw) for advice on the last section. Check out their gideon fanfic!
> 
> hit me up on tumblr at [jade-ellsworth](https://jade-ellsworth.tumblr.com)!


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